Rivers in the Desert

by Margaret L Davis

  Meanwhile the people in the Owens Valley were outraged to learn not only of the federal government’s desertion but of the predictions of their bleak future. “It probably means the wiping out of the town of Independence,” stated the Times flatly, and a quote attributed to Mulholland that the land in the valley was “so poor that it didn’t pay to irrigate it” added fuel to their mounting anger.

  In Bishop the day the aqueduct story broke, Fred Eaton faced a menacing crowd of farmers enraged at what they considered their victimization by the former Los Angeles mayor. They threatened to string a noose around his neck. Barely escaping with his life, Eaton denied any wrongdoing, later announcing in an Owens Valley newspaper that he planned to spend his now considerable wealth and remainder of his life in the valley, adding, “in being a good neighbor I shall have an opportunity to retrieve myself and clear away all unhappy recollections.” Then, once back in Los Angeles, he vented his rage upon water officials for allowing the Times to place him in such a life-threatening position. “They say I sold them out, sold them out and the government too; that I shall never take the water out of the valley; that when I go back for my cattle they will drown me in the river.”

  For his own dubious role in the scheme, Joseph Lippincott did not escape the rage of the duped valley citizens. His actions were criticized even in the Oval Office, where impassioned pleas were put before President Theodore Roosevelt by Owens Valley citizens and their congressional representatives to restore the Reclamation Service’s original water project in the valley. As hostile feelings continued to grow among Owens Valley ranchers, area newspapers launched virulent attacks on Lippincott and “the Los Angeles cabal of water-seekers.” Hatred for Lippincott, the man whom valley dwellers felt betrayed them most, ran so high that one angry crowd plotted to kidnap him, but at the last minute failed to carry out their plan.

  In Washington, the Reclamation Service officials acted quickly to rid themselves of Lippincott’s taint by demanding his removal from office. Lippincott quickly resigned and almost immediately was offered a more remunerative, $6,000-a-year job with the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. He would join Mulholland on the city’s payroll as Assistant Chief Engineer of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

  On the Monday following the Los Angeles Times announcement, members of the Los Angeles City Council met to order an immediate polling on the issuance of $1.5 million in bonds to pay for land and water rights purchases in the Owens Valley. The first of two bond ballots (the first in 1905 for $1.5 million for land rights and the second in 1907 for $23 million in construction costs) was to be held on September 7, only three weeks away, notoriously the hottest time of the year. The council then adjourned to a champagne luncheon with William Mulholland, Fred Eaton, W. B. Mathews and the city’s Board of Water Commissioners.

  For the next three weeks, Eaton and Mulholland launched a vigorous round of campaigning, speech-making, and pressing the flesh. Night after night, they visited civic groups to urge their vote. Despite Eaton’s waning enthusiasm as dreams of his potential windfall dwindled, his own interests forced him to continue his role as a leading project advocate.

  Conveniently, the September heat delivered the final touch. As temperatures exceeded 100 degrees prior to the election and as water levels concurrently dipped, Mulholland used the city’s oldest enemy—drought—to scare the daylights out of the hot and thirsty citizens.

  In his basic stump speech, Mulholland wiped his sweating brow with his handkerchief and sympathized with the sweltering and tired members of his audience. He decried the “current emergency,” warning that the entire city would soon be bone-dry. As the hot spell continued and water consumption skyrocketed, Mulholland refused to let the events go unheralded.

  “This illustrates better than anything else could, the absolute necessity for securing a source of water supply elsewhere,” he announced. “We must have it”

  And have it they did. The Chamber of Commerce, the Municipal League, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, and all leading civic and commercial organizations threw their zealous support behind the bond issue. Boosters heralded the gigantic undertaking as the key to creating a Garden of Eden in the southland, thus assuring Los Angeles’s future prominence as one of the world’s great cities.

  Detractors pulverized the project as ill-conceived and ripe for graft, designed to make a handful of important men fabulously wealthy while bankrupting the citizens of Los Angeles with over-taxation. In one stinging charge that left the natives of Owens Valley feeling both irate and joyous, a respected Pasadena physician announced that his scientific tests revealed that Owens River water was a “vile bed of typhoid germs,” and therefore, unfit to drink.

  Mulholland, Eaton, and their entourage of assistants continued to feast and boost, sometimes challenging their endurance by dining at three or more banquets during the course of a single evening as they traveled from one appearance to the next. After delivering their speeches, they were applauded, interviewed, and photographed, and the two men would often conclude their remarks standing side by side with arms uplifted in victory, looking very much like a presidential ticket.

  At one highly publicized appearance before the Municipal League at the stylish Westminster Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, William Mulholland was received with unrestrained enthusiasm. Prominent businessmen, members of the city council and judiciary, bankers, lawyers, and publishers—all the movers and shakers of the city with the means to get any issue off the ground—listened intently in concerned silence as he began a passionate appeal. By meeting’s end, Mulholland had whipped the room into a frothy intensity, like a preacher conducting an old-fashioned revival meeting.

  “If we could only make the people see the precarious condition in which Los Angeles stands!” pleaded Mulholland. “If we could only pound it in to them!” he added, pounding his own meaty fist.

  “If Los Angeles runs out of water for one week the city within a year will not have a population of 100,000 people. A city quickly finds its level and that level is its water supply!”

  Waves of wild applause erupted into bursts of cheers and whistles. Like the consummate stage performer he had become, Mulholland knew instinctively how to win his audience.

  Historians disagree on how grave the “water famine” was that faced the city of Los Angeles in 1905. Some speculate that the drought was really a brilliantly orchestrated scare tactic. But internal memoranda from the Department of Water and Power and Mulholland’s own correspondence indicate that prior to the election he had been forced by outright necessity to prohibit the sprinkling of lawns, restrict water flow into city fountains and parks, and order strict prohibitions of sewer flushing and domestic household water waste in order to preserve the water supply. He frantically installed elaborate pumping devices in underground artesian wells, and, when that failed, halted irrigation in the San Fernando Valley. Infuriated San Fernando farmers sued, causing Mulholland to spend countless hours at the county courthouse defending his department’s actions.

  Mulholland claimed reservoir levels during this period were the lowest he had ever seen. Weeks before the election, during the hottest part of the summer, the Buena Vista Reservoir’s supply had fallen eight feet by 10 A.M. and sunk yet another foot before nightfall. Mulholland assessed the situation as critical and mandated a reduced water consumption of one million gallons a day. The city, Mulholland concluded solemnly, now “faced outright water famine.”

  Though he may have resorted to some exaggeration in his plea for votes, official records substantiate that Los Angeles’s water supply had declined rapidly by 1905, and his concern for the city was genuine.

  In the Owens Valley, local newspapers woefully predicted the valley’s own demise and encouraged prominent citizens to fight the “water poachers” all the way to the White House if necessary. A bill was sponsored in Congress by wealthy anti-aqueduct landholders to prevent Los Angeles from using any Owens water for irrigation, but in a midnight meeting at the White Hous
e, President Theodore Roosevelt, who had signed the Reclamation Act to maximize use of natural resources, predictably vetoed the bill, giving Los Angeles permission to do with the water what it wanted.

  GOSSIP AND INNUENDO surrounding Fred Eaton’s financial interest in the aqueduct fizzled and by election day, he was virtually approbation-free. But shortly before the voters were to cast their ballots, new rumors surfaced that a powerful land syndicate had secretly bought up land options in the arid San Fernando Valley and stood to make millions when the aqueduct water arrived. Revelation of the syndicate’s existence immediately threw the whole campaign into a tailspin, and posed the most blistering threat to passage of the bond issue.

  Weeks before the election, the Los Angeles Examiner, still smarting over the Times’s scoop, broke a story some called the “Scandal of the Century” and claimed that through illicit communications long before the aqueduct’s plan was made public, wealthy men were allowed to buy up San Fernando Valley lands at bargain prices.

  The Examiner revealed that almost a year earlier on November 28, 1904, less than three months from the day Mulholland and Eaton set out in their buckboard for the Owens Valley, a syndicate of private investors, acting on inside information supposedly limited to government officials, purchased a $50,000 option on the Porter Lands—16,200 arid acres in the north end of the uninhabitable and unfarmable San Fernando Valley—an option that, if the aqueduct were to be constructed, would be worth millions of dollars. The Examiner named ten syndicate members, each of whom held one thousand shares in the “San Fernando Mission Land Company,” at a par value of $100 per share. The list included Leslie C. Brand, president of the Title Guarantee and Trust Company, raft magnate Henry E. Huntington, Edward H. Harriman of the Union Pacific, W. G. Kerchoff, president of Pacific Light and Power, and Joseph F. Sartori, president of the Security Trust Savings Bank. Of special interest to the tabloid writers were syndicate members Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Times; Edwin Earl of the Express; and Moses Hazeltine Sherman, trolley magnate and member of the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners.

  The Examiner claimed that this syndicate, which had paid $35 an acre for the Porter Ranch, stood to make a profit of $5,546,000, as land values increased from $200 to $4,000 an acre. Although the option had been arranged before the syndicate learned the full details of the aqueduct’s proposal, members of the group benefited handsomely from inside information provided by Moses H. Sherman who, as a member of the Los Angeles Board of Water Commissioners, could not have been a better set of eyes and ears. Apparently, he leaked Mulholland’s intentions to build the giant system to his colleagues. Thanks to Sherman’s dual role as Water Board Commissioner and syndicate investor, his cohorts were fully apprised of the city’s plans in the Owens Valley, and were able to exercise their options on the Porter Ranch the same day that Fred Eaton telegraphed the water commission that his option on the Rickey ranch in Long Valley had been secured.

  “Why should Mr. Eaton and his conferees have given the profitable tip to Messrs. Otis, Earl & Co.?” queried the Examiner. “Was this a consideration for newspaper support?”

  The Examiner’s exposé caused members of the syndicate to nervously counterattack. The Times’s Otis accused publisher Hearst of misinforming the public, and smearing the names of prominent Los Angeles citizens. He called the Examiner’s Porter Ranch story “the very essence of absurdity. Mr. Otis and his fellows conceiving the Owens River project as a way to irrigate their San Fernando lands at public expense, has no foundation in the record.” Equally incensed at the charges of his own duplicity in the affair, Fred Eaton tried to physically assault the Examiner’s editor by punching him in the nose.

  Enemies of the aqueduct found a forum in the pages of the Examiner and promoted theories of corruption and conspiracy dating back to when “Old Bill Mulholland and his bunch of cohorts” created an artificial water famine to get the aqueduct project approved. The knockers protested that the giant project could never be completed for the $23 million Mulholland claimed and would collapse after the first earthquake.

  Ironically, despite the plethora of reasons given by anti-aqueduct papers for voting against Mulholland’s plan, their strongest argument was one they did not give: almost no one suggested the plan ought to be opposed because the water belonged to the residents of the Owens Valley. Los Angeles would be destroying its northern neighbor’s livelihood in taking it.

  THE SYNDICATE-CONTROLLED PAPERS portrayed Mulholland as a giant among men in carefully constructed stories, many penned by Times reporter Allen Kelly, who later left the Times to work in public relations for the water department. Otis and the syndicate recognized Mulholland’s popularity and persuasiveness, and understood how much the public trusted him. By prominently featuring Mulholland in pro-aqueduct editorials, Otis and the syndicate members believed that the charges of graft and corruption against them might be dissipated.

  Mulholland had the folk appeal of the rough-but-honest immigrant making his way among high-toned, slick businessmen. Born in Belfast in 1855, he had come West to seek his fortune. At the age of fourteen, Mulholland had left Ireland without his father’s blessing to become an apprentice sailor. He crossed the Atlantic nineteen times during the next five years, visiting the ports of Europe, the United States and the West Indies, landing in Los Angeles in 1876.

  Uneducated but strong and hearty with a quick mechanical mind, he found employment with the Los Angeles City Water Company, a private enterprise that had struggled to supply water to the nascent city of 15,000. His first job was as a zanjero or ditch tender for the primitive water works along the banks of the Los Angeles River. By the time the city acquired and municipalized the water company, Mulholland had replaced Fred Eaton as chief superintendent and Eaton had gone on to be elected city engineer and then mayor.

  Mulholland had vigorously supported Eaton’s candidacy. The two friends found themselves entrenched at the apex of city government: Eaton as mayor and Mulholland as water chief. City Hall was only a few blocks from the water company and Eaton and Mulholland met almost daily to drink and dine at their favorite downtown restaurant and talk political strategy. Nevertheless, Mulholland’s image with the public was not that of the political insider, but rather that of the common working man.

  News articles promoted Mulholland as a forthright character who “cut right through the bull.” There was considerable truth in this image. Uncomfortable behind a desk, Mulholland spent most of his days in the field. He disliked writing reports of any kind and while other engineers took copious field notes and produced charts and reports, Mulholland relied instead on his prodigious memory. He left paperwork to subordinates; his business memos were invariably brief and he avoided correspondence whenever possible, stating that “if you leave a letter in the basket long enough, it will take care of itself.”

  In 1902, when the city sought to gain control of the private water company, Mulholland had been the company’s chief officer during its long and bitter negotiations with the city. When Mulholland failed to produce the necessary records and inventories sought during the negotiations, many assumed that he was hiding information or acting vindictively. But as negotiations drew to a close, they discovered that these records did not exist—the company lacked even a simple blueprint of its existing water system. All data—down to the exact size of every foot of pipe, the age and location of every valve and pump—was carried in Mulholland’s head.

  The task of creating an engaging image for Mulholland was greatly facilitated for the press by Mulholland himself. He had a warm Irish accent, was quick with a witty turn of phrase, and was an entertaining public speaker. As election day approached, the land syndicate made effective use of Mulholland’s personality. Their hero posed for photographers, gave interviews and attended political events, delivering rousing pro-aqueduct speeches. Making daily appearances at rallies, armed with charts, blueprints, and financial statements, Mulholland used his fiery oratory and considerable Irish wit to stir
up voter enthusiasm: “If you don’t get the water now, you’ll never need it. The dead never get thirsty.”

  In later years, Mulholland supporters would recognize that in his zeal to promote passage of the bonds, Mulholland, in his paternalistic responsibility for Los Angeles and despite his own personal sacrifices, unwittingly allowed himself to be used by the syndicate for its own purposes.

  Everywhere, the city was preparing for water. Pedestrians lapels blossomed with buttons proclaiming, “I’m for Owens River Water.” Attached to the buttons were small vials of the liquid. Passing automobiles were decked with banners, “Owens Water—Vote for It.” School children paraded down city streets holding placards. Churches held special meetings, their congregations chanting “he showed me a river and everything shall live wheresoever the water comes.” The Ladies Club hosted a week of special lunches—featured was tea made from Owens Valley water. The city’s mayor named the Tuesday before the election “Aqueduct Day.”

  Mulholland continued his one-man show to the very end, visiting every meeting and rally he could. “Our population has doubled since 1904 while our water supply has diminished,” Mulholland said at the final rally. “Owens is our only source, and defeat of these bonds would be fatal to the prosperity of the city.”

  On the morning of September 7, 1905, hundreds of cars and carriages hired by syndicate members and sponsored by special interest groups shuttled voters to the polls all day. Their labors paid off. After one of the most turbulent campaigns in the city’s history, the bond issue passed overwhelmingly—by a margin of 10 to 1

  “Owens River is ours,” a Times editorial exclaimed in celebration, and our business now is to hustle and bring it here and make Los Angeles the garden spot of the earth and the home of millions of contented people.”